EVE Online – New Player Guide

Introduction:

Eve-Online is, in my opinion a much more complex MMO then many others, so it does tend to have a fairly higher learning curve. This guide will give new players the gist of what to do in the first few days and weeks of starting a character in Eve.

Please notice the words “starting off” in the title, this guide will not hold your hand all the way into late game, its just meant to teach you how to get your character off the ground in areas such as — Making your character, Making Isk, Setting up your first ships, and other basic concepts.

Also keep in mind that I’m sure that there are people that will disagree with some of the ideas and suggestions in this guide. As Eve tends to be more complex in many areas then in most MMOs there are many times in which the answer falls in sort of a “grey area” in which people will never totally agree on the answer, also there are many times the answer to a question will be “It Depends”. One example of this is to a question I here very often from new players. “What is the best (insert ship type)?” The answer. . “It depends”

Depends on what? The situation, and your skills mainly. Say you wanted to know if you should choose a Thorax or a Vexor for your next Cruiser and you ask “Which one is better?” In this case it depends on your skills. There are different weapons skills you can have such as Missles, Gunnery, and Drones. If you have high drone skills the Vexor would be the ship for you, while if you have high gunnery skills the Thorax would serve you better. But thats enough about that for now, onto the real guide.

Part 1 — Making a Character, well.

Amarr Scum! Oh wait, i like them

here is a difference between making a character and making one WELL. This isn’t WoW where you just throw together a character and most of the choices are made after its created. In Eve some of the most important choices you make are made right here, at the beginning.

This may mean restarting your character in order to get a better start. Trust me, its better to do this sooner rather then later, making your character well in the beginning will pay off in the long run. Now we will break making a new character into steps.

1. Decide what the character is going to do. Are you going to be combat oriented, making your fortunes with guns blazing? Or do you want to aim your turrets at some juicy asteroids, mining masses of valuable ore and either selling the ore or perhaps manufacturing goods to sell at a profit? Then again you could go the way of the trader and look for those lucrative “Buy low sell high” chances in the markets of Eve.

All of these choices are viable ways to make a living in Eve, some pay off in late game more then early game but none the less all can make you money. So it is important to know what way you are going BEFORE making your character.

2. Choosing your Race. In Eve there are 4 races. The Amarr Empire, The Minmatar Republic, The Gallente Federation, and The Caldari State. I will not go into their histories as that is not the point of this guide.

If you have chosen the path of the Industrialist and wish to mine, there is little difference in what race you choose as the biggest mining ships, called “Mining Barges” and “Exhumers,” are a non racial ship so you get the same bonuses no matter what race you are.

Now if you have decided to be a combat pilot the choice in Race makes a MUCH bigger difference as each have very unique fighting styles. I will briefly outline each race one at a time.

-The Amarr use energy weapons that don’t use ammo as other races do. The Amarr fit their weapons with crystals that change the characteristics of their weapon and these crystals slowly degrade till eventually they break. This can be nice as you do not need tons of ammo sitting in your cargo taking up space. A disadvantage to the Amarr however is that all their weapons do EM/Thermal damage and while that may be good for taking out an enemies shields (shields are inherently weak to EM) it’s not so good for taking out their armor (Armor is inherently strong against EM). (DO NOT take this to mean the Amarr are not a good choice, the Amarr excel at large Battleship slugging matches and other areas, every race has a way it can be used in just about any area of game play.)

-The Gallente don’t rely just on their guns for power as they have mastered the use of drones that can fight for them. This gives them the same advantage as the Amarr in the way that your drones do not require ammo. But the Gallente are not limited to only drones, they can field powerful Hybrid weapons that fire charges that primarily do Thermal/Kinetic damage. This tends to be a better overall combo of damage types then the Amarr. (My personal opinion is that The Gallente are the best all around race for being able to dabble in just about any area of Eve. But thats my opinion.)

-The Minmatar use projectile weapons that don’t require energy from your ships capacitor to fire allowing them to use their energy to keep their ship alive longer. Also this brings us to one of the biggest advantages of the Minmatar. Their ammo selection is huge. With the Amarr you only fire EM/Thermal, Gallente fire Thermal/Kinetic. But the Minmatar have different ammo types to do just about any kind of damage you need. Example of usefulness would be if you are engaging an enemy that you know has low resistance to Explosive damage you just unload your ammo and throw in your explosive ammo and go to town on his exposed resistance.

-The Caldari use a myriad of different missiles, rockets, and torpedos to rain death down on their enemies. Like the Minmatar the Caldari have a decent selection of missile types to do different types of damage allowing you to find and exploit resistance holes in your enemies defenses. I may point out that the Caldari are considered to be very good at PVE combat.

2. Your Bloodline comes next, think of a bloodline as a subrace. The main things a Bloodline does is it alters your starting attributes and determines some of your starting skills which can have a large impact on how you start. Some are high in Perception/Willpower, some Intelligence/Memory and so on. Some of them will be geared toward weapons or perhaps Mechanic, while others might be more aimed toward less combat oriented skills. This is a very important choice as it will have huge effects on how fast you can learn certain skills as well as if you start off with combat skills or industrial skills.
Each skill in Eve has a Primary and Secondary attribute governing how fast you learn it. The higher those two attributes the faster you learn the skill. A lot of people go with one of these two groupings of attributes.

Perception/Willpower: Using this combo will allow you to learn Spaceship Command, Gunnery, and Missiles more quickly. So in other words you would be able to get into the next ship of your dreams a little faster and you would be able to train the weapons skills for it quickly too. But as you will have lower other attributes you would not be able to learn your support skills as quickly. I may point out that just cause this sounds like its going to make you uber faster doesn’t make it so. You’re support skills are JUST AS IMPORTANT as your weapons and ship skills. In fact they would be more important then the ship skills in some ways.
Intelligence/Memory: This combo would allow you to learn Electronics, Engineering, Science,Mechanic, Industry, and Learning faster. So while it will take you longer to get into that nice new Battleship, you will have plenty of support skills to back it up once you do get it. Your capacitor will last longer (Engineering), your armor will hold better (Mechanic) and Science leads you down many roads, one of which is implants which are another thing that can use to yet again increase your attributes. One very important thing to note is that your learning skills are in this grouping. Learning skills increase your attributes even further (+1 per skill level) and getting them up early on is one thing that most people in Eve will not disagree on.

It is also worthy of mention to say that NOT ALL skill groups follow these two combos. Such as Drones which uses Memory/Perception. Trade uses Charisma/Willpower and Social which uses Charisma/Intelligence.

For the record books, be wary of using a high Charisma character. The uses for Charisma are more limited then the others and normally center around Trade and running Missions for NPC agents. If you are making a Mission runner or a Merchant, looking for those Buy low sell high chances mentioned earlier then this may be the route for you, but in all honesty I don’t think that would be your best choice for a first character.

It should be mentioned that there are those that believe a balanced setup is the best for new players, making it so most skills train at roughly the same pace. The choice in this area is up to you, but you should have a reason for an unbalanced setup, such as specializing for trade or mission running.

To give you an example. A balanced attribute setup would be something like all your attributes being somewhere around 6 or 7. While an unbalanced setup would be like you would have 2 at like 12 and one (probably charisma) at around 3 and the others a little higher then that.

This all may sound confusing but when you really get into the game it’s fairly simple. If you are still confused about this then just read the rest of the guide and then make your character, you can try to contact a more experienced player to help you. But anyway, on with the guide.

After you choose your Bloodline you are given free attributes to allocate where you wish. Where you put these will depend on what you decided above. If you are biasing your character toward an attribute combo then use them in cooperation with your combo, if you decided on balance then use them to balance the character further.

Now, basically you are left with 3 things. Ancestry, School, and Specialization. These again decide starting skills that will determine whether you start with combat skills or industrial skills.